Subtract Until it Breaks

Suzanne: It looks like your got your start more on the marketing side; you had worked in marketing, you did some work as a writer and a social media commentator. Ended up in product management at Mahalo, that was your first PM job. What prompted the shift? Was it a conscious “I want to move in this direction?”

Mike: Yeah, it was kind of weird. In high school / college, I started to really get into technology and I geeked out on computers and different things, but in college I studied economics, very much math-focused. After I got out of school, I fell into a job that was more marketing centric, but I knew my love for technology, especially consumer tech and apps and different things was right when the first iPhone was released, so I kind of wanted to get in that direction. At Mahalo, I had the opportunity to work on product things; designing systems, different things like that. I just took the opportunity to shift my career that way and that’s when I made the switch.

Suzanne: Had you had any formal training in any of those things?

Mike: No, no formal training. I was kind of thrown in the deep end. At Mahalo, working for Jason Calacanis, he sort of wore many hats and he likes to hire sort of young guns that are ambitious and want to do things, so I definitely was able to take on responsibilities and things I probably wouldn’t have had the chance to take on at larger companies. That was kind of a great thing, where I could just do things I’d never done and from there just leverage that experience.

Suzanne: What were some of the things that you did right off the bat that you had never done? Do you remember the first assignment or “Okay, you got to do this” and you were like “I have no idea what that is.”

Mike: Yeah. One of the first things, Mahalo at the time was producing content and monetizing the Ad Sense words, it’s called a demand media model, and we were challenged with scaling up our content production, getting more writers, remote writers. It was designing a system to get writers to pick up articles, write them, and then get paid. Basically, it was designing that system. At first, it was really manual and clunky and as time went on, we basically formalized some of the manual processes that I created using everything from Google Spreadsheets to just crazy things, and then worked with developers to actually build formalized tools to manage the process. It was my first foray into designing systems and thinking about it was through that.

Suzanne: Right, so you, quite literally, learned on the job.

Mike: Exactly.

Suzanne: How do you think you got that job to begin with? You said the CEO was looking for young guns. Was it just, I walked in and I was the profile of the right amount of ambitious and hungry enough and they ignored everything else on my resume, or you had things on your resume that they saw could be transferable or valuable?

Mike: You mentioned the writing and social media. Before I even moved to LA, my passion for technology, consumer stuff, I actually reached out to The Next Web at the time, and was able to become a part-time writer. Not getting paid, not for anything, I just did it to build my own personal brand and to get experience and at least be talking about things that I wanted to work on but I wasn’t currently at my current job.

I did that, and I think one of the things that I remember during the interview process that stood out was my passion for technology in the space, because I had been writing for The Next Web. Even though I wasn’t working in project management or that area, I positioned myself in the best way I could, through my writing, to try to show my interest and show my passion in that area. I think that was one of the differentiating factors during the interview process, was just my interest outside of work in that space.

Suzanne: Right. How did you convince The Next Web to let you be a contributing author?

Mike: I mean, if you’re working for free, right? I was active on Twitter and got to interact with the editor over there and I wrote a couple pieces. They have to approve them before they go live, so it was pretty easy to sell. It’s not that hard to, whether it’s The Next Web or any other publications, if you have ambition and you can write decently, you can probably become a contributor and if you’re not working in project management or those areas, it’s a good way to build a personal brand around it; so when you are sitting across the table from someone for a product job, you can show your thoughts around the specific area even though you might not be working there.

Suzanne: Right. Cool! Awesome. So we’re here at JibJab. You think they’ll let me take a photo or two of the space?

Mike: Yeah, for sure!

Suzanne: Okay, cool! The world will want to know.

Mike: We don’t have any top secret stuff!

Suzanne: Give us just a super high-level, something that we wouldn’t find on the website, but in your words, what is JibJab about? Part 2 is what are you doing specifically as part of the mobile team?

Mike: The core of JibJab, it’s founded 15, 16 years ago now so it’s been around for awhile. It’s gone through lots of iterations, but the core thing is making people laugh, making people happy. For the last 7 or 8 years or so that’s centered on the starring you, which is your face, in content. The existing business, the one that keeps the lights on and pays the bills, is the eCard business on the website, and also now on the iOS app. My current task is trying to figure out how we take the eCards, which is very much a model in a format that was conceived of in the desktop era, and involve on mobile devices. We’re working on reinventing JibJab in the mobile space.

Suzanne: Any major milestones or releases that have just come out or are forthcoming for the world or it’s like “Wait until you see this new face of JibJab. Wait until you see this new mobile era that we’ve been cooking up here.”

Mike: A couple years ago we released the iOS app, and then about a year later on Android. In addition to eCards, we have “star you” gifts: looping GIFs with your face, stickers, emoji, different things like that. Now the mobile app has eCards but it also has this more shorter form content that’s more conducive to quick, everyday sharing, because what we see with eCards is that it’s a handful of times a year that you want to send an eCard; whether it’s a for a holiday or a birthday. With our shorter form content that we release, it’s about everyday things, emotions you want to express with friends. That’s what’s in the market now.

The next major thing we’re working on is to take that personalization further, probably something towards the holidays, which are a big time of the year, that we’ll have something there.

Suzanne: Is the idea with the mobile app move it away from being “Oh, it’s Christmas. I should do a fun elf things” into… Another way to put it is, you look at what’s happening with Snapchat. It’s like “Oh, here’s a new filter. Let’s play with this filter for the next two days until we’ve exhausted it”, so kind of moving into that space of “Let’s get people interacting daily and being part of the product,” is that a goal?

Mike: It’s definitely a goal. Our major objective is to just increase the frequency of use, because eCards is a very low frequency use case, whereas GIFs, stickers, emoji, things you send via text everyday, multiple times a day. It’s trying to align the core of JibJab, which is around the face personalization, with content formats and things people want to use in a frequent manner. That’s the main objective with the evolution of our formats.

Suzanne: Okay. You self describe yourself as a product owner when you talk about being responsible for managing sprint cycles and really an active role in the development planning. Can you explain, in your words, the distinction between the term product owner and product manager, as it relates for you?

Mike: JibJab, we’re still a fairly small company, so people wear different hats.

Suzanne: Elf hats.

Mike: Elf hats, exactly. In addition to normal product manager type tasks, I’m also managing the cadence and the weekly spring process, which in a large organization you probably have a scrum master [inaudible 00:11:22] have these roles more separated, but for JibJab, our team’s so small, not only my designing the UX of a next feature, looking at data, analyzing how the app’s performing but also day-to-day, week-to-week, managing new features and things though the pipelines of two shipments. It’s that dual hats is how I work at JibJab.

Suzanne: The developers are all in house here?

Mike: Correct, yes. We occasionally, for different projects, outsource, but more or less, everything’s in house.

Suzanne: How many dedicated developers do you have for your team or your product in mobile apps?

Mike: The mobile app team, resources have been shifting recently, but right now we have 5 developers, and then we have a separate dedicated QA team, and then designers, and then production. Those are the different areas.

Suzanne: How much, when you talk about your day-to-day, give me a sample of you walk in, you walk in at 9 or you walk in at 11? Tell the truth.

Mike: I walk in around 10.

Suzanne: Split the difference. I notice because I live on the east side, so whenever I come to the west side, I’m like “Oh yeah, this is how people live, it’s just relaxed, they’re walking their dogs, it’s perfect”, and I think “Why am I on the east side again?” It’s got its merits.

So you come in around 10, what happens? Give the rundown.

Mike: So we have a daily stand up at 10:10 in Slack.

Suzanne: Do you lead that?

Mike: It’s actually in Slack, so we have a bot that manages it, so we use, it’s called tattoo, it’s a Slackbot and it just asks everyone what they did yesterday, what they’re doing today, any blockers. We actually have an interesting one at the end which is “What did you learn yesterday? What’s one thing you learned?” It’s a cool way to get a little taste for someone’s interests and who they are outside of work because it’s always interesting and it doesn’t necessarily always pertain to work.

So I get in, we have the Slack stand up, and then it just depends. My day-to-day will vary quite a bit within months or periods of time depending on what we’re working on. If we’re working on a major new feature or redesign, then it’s going to be heavy UX design, designing flows, and then sketch, just sort of thinking through a product challenge. Whereas if we’re more in maintenance mode, it’s different types of things. It depends on where we’re at product wise in the cycle.

Suzanne: You mentioned that you had designers on your team, but you’ve also now mentioned twice steering some UX. Help me understand, how is that flowing? Are you owning the user experience ideas and then parsing that off to the designers, is it collaborative?

Mike: It’s definitely collaborative. If what I’m working on is an iteration from what our current experience is, I’ll have our style guide and Sketch files to work from, so I’m more or less just designing in a pixel perfect based on our current aesthetic and current structure. But if it’s blue sky, new feature, nothing resembling the current app has it, then I’ll first work in a wire-framing tool just to think through the flow, and then I’ll take a first stab at the UX using Sketch, but more or less just black and white; not focusing on design and color, just layout. Then I’ll start to engage with a designer at some point in that process and then they’ll take it from there.

Suzanne: Do you have a current favorite wire-framing tool?

Mike: It depends. I use Lucid Charts for more complex ones and for basic ones, there’s another one that I use, I’m blanking on that… the name… Mindmeister! So just for more brainstorming and then Lucid Charts for wire framing.

Suzanne: When you talk about just playing with ideas, is that results from certain analyses that are catalyzing you to say “Oh, we’ve got to play with this, we’re not getting the conversions that we want here” or is that just you obsessively thinking everyday about “How could the product be different? What if we moved this button here? What if we did this thing?” Another way to put it is, is that need being mandated or are you mandating as a way to constantly ideating and innovating on the product.

Mike: We have, as a team, certain high-level KPIs that we’re trying to improve, that I read upon are the most important things. For the current app, it’s really 7, 30 day retention. We’re trying to release any features, change the UX in any ways that we think is going to have the highest impact on retention. If it’s not KPI related, then it’s maybe just an improvement of the experience, certainly bug fixes, improving flows, but more or less we try to focus our efforts on the KPIs that we’ve agreed upon.

Suzanne: Who sets the KPIs?

Mike: It depends. It’s a collaborative process so it’s the product team goes up to the CEO, and it just depends on what we thinks the thing we need to focus on at that moment. Where we are now with the product, it’s all about retention, trying to get the product market fit, and get users to stay in the product. That’s where we are now.

Suzanne: How often, typically, will the KPIs change? Is it quarterly, is it annually, is it “Everyone, stop working on retention and start working on this!”

Mike: It just depends. There’s no set duration, it just depends on how the product evolves and when we think it’s better to focus on something else or what opportunities come up. Last year, we’re working on stuff and then all of a sudden, Facebook called us up and said “Hey, we’re working on this new platform for messenger. Do you guys want to work with us?” So we shifted resources to work on that. So it all depends and certainly, sometimes things come up that change your strategy, so you just have to be agile.

Suzanne: To go back to what you were talking about, retention is the KPI, retention is on your mind. At what kind of point do you go from collecting the data into making a change? Is that weekly, is that monthly, what is the cycle where you say “Okay, we looked at our 7 and 30 day retention number over X period, and now we’re going to institute a change”.

Mike: Looking at data is a weekly process. For things that are key things we’ve released to effect retention, we can look at things pretty quickly, probably a week or two depending on the feature before we can get a signal if it’s working or if it’s not. One big recent win for us was birthday alerts in the JibJab app, for retention. We were able to release a feature that basically notifies, sends a push notification when a user has a birthday after they’ve [inaudible 00:18:55] with their calendar, so we’ve seen that as a big win. So it just depends on how long it’s going to take users to adopt a feature to get feedback.

Suzanne: Right, right. You’ve been here 4 years?

Mike: I have.

Suzanne: You started as a PM. Now you’re a big PM, the senior PM is your title. How would you describe here, from a product manager role to a senior product manager in terms of skillset requirements and responsibilities?

Mike: Because JibJab is such a flat organization, to be honest, I wouldn’t say that the responsibilities or skillset has changed quite a bit. It’s more of just the trust in making decisions. When I was here early on, I had to defer to my boss or defer to other people, Greg, the CEO, on decisions but now I’m in power to make more of the decisions because I have more of a trust and I have experience here. I would say that’s the biggest difference, but not necessarily the actual things I’ve been working on, because our team is so small.

Suzanne: How many product managers in total?

Mike: JibJab is split into different brands. Within JibJab itself, there is the mobile team, which I lead, and then there is the web team, which is a separate product team, which has two PMs. There’s also storybots, which JibJab for kids you can think of it as, but it’s a separate brand that’s geared towards kids that has it’s own PM.

Suzanne: So 4 PMs divided between these different…?

Mike: Each major brand has a PM except for JibJab which has 2 because it’s a bigger project.

Suzanne: Is there an SVP of product or a direct person in charge of product management as a department or it just goes straight to C-level from there?

Mike: For JibJab, one of the PMs is that, for JibJab web. For the JibJab mobile team, I do have a person I report to, but it’s not necessarily an SVP of product. He’s more of a design-centric, so technically it’s my report but his focus and expertise is more on the design side, but any product stuff still has to go through him.

Suzanne: What do you think is the most misunderstood aspect of product management?

Mike: Most misunderstood aspect… I think the hardest thing, I don’t know if I’d say it’s misunderstood, but the hardest thing is the role and the requirements of the role vary quite a bit depending on the company, the stage of the company or product that you’re working on, and so for one position you may need one skillset and for another it’s completely different. I think that’s one of the challenging things getting into product and understanding it is because the role and the needs of the role change quite a bit depending on where you’re at and what your exact role is at the company.

Suzanne: If you had some young disciple looking to you and all of your years of experience, what advice would you give them for navigating that space, that it’s like the goalposts are always going to be moving?

Mike: I think understanding what you’re most passionate and interested in, in terms of product management, is it the data crunching and the data analysis, is it the UX and the user experience design, is it optimizing and AB testing? Defining what your particular interest is within the sphere of responsibilities that project managers have and then focusing and branding and fine-tuning your skills in that area, but at the end of the day, it is always a dynamic position that you need to wear many hats and being the CEO of the product requires skills in lots of different disciplines.

Suzanne: Do you have a favorite? Of those little pockets you talked about, is there one that you’re like “Well, if I had to hold onto it, it would be data crunching, or…”?

Mike: I enjoy all aspects, but I love obsessing over the littlest details in a product.

Suzanne: Like what?

Mike: Recently, we updated our search UX in the mobile app, and we went through a solid week to week and a half of just iteration on just very small nuances and changes to make it just feel right. I love the nitty-gritty details. I tend to be a little OCD personally, so I’m very in-tune with the fine details and I love analyzing, whether it’s the app I’m working on or the product I’m working on, other apps, just try to understand the thinking behind the ways that something is designed down to the smallest details is very interesting to me.

Suzanne: To take that example you just described, is that something that you would, specifically for you and your team, how much iterating is happening at the design, prototype level versus give it to the devs, have them deliver it onto a staging site, test it, play with it, iterate it from there; where is the bulk of the iteration take place?

Mike: Big changes that you really can’t get a feel for until it’s built, we try to prototype those if we have time. Something like search would be something we’d want to prototype to try to get a feel, and all those iterations and changes hopefully happen before it gets in the hands of a developer. For more basic things that just, a flat design, a Photoshop or Sketch file is going to work, then we just hand that off to a developer, so it depends on the scope of the feature and how much potentially could get lost between the design and the final product, and depending on that, we’ll try to prototype. Certainly if there’s animation involved, we’ll have the animation created by our art department, so it just depends.

Suzanne: I remember what I wanted to ask before. When you were talking about all of the different product managers owning their divisions or their brands, how much are you interfacing with them? How much is the mobile app being connected to initiatives on the web or is it like “You’re over here, and we’re over here, and as long as we’re honoring the brand guidelines and the brand promise, everything else is open season and independent”.

Mike: The storybot’s brand is completely separate because it’s just an entirely different product. For the JibJab web and mobile, because both the web and mobile team have eCards, we try to make the experience for that particular content format as close as possible, and then we also have foundational APIs and technologies that both teams share from payments, accounts, so there’s aspects of the teams as related to those that interface. Not heavily day-to-day or week-to-week, but we’ll have the same designers work on the user experience, so we try to keep a consistency on that level.

Suzanne: Okay. Different developer teams though?

Mike: Correct.

Suzanne: Okay. Different developer teams, shared design teams, separate PMs, and collaborate as needed.

Mike: Yeah, and that may be evolving for JibJab as we figure out how JibJab reinvents itself in the mobile era. Those teams may be shifting depending on how different this new experience is from eCards and the ownership of the mobile experience may eventually shift to the team that manages the web experience. It depends on how our product evolves.

Suzanne: Right.

Mike: Right now, it’s divided on mobile, web.

Suzanne: You mentioned about Facebook having an initiative for Messenger and I brought up Snapchat earlier. How does what’s happening in the world of instant messenger applications, Kik, Snapchat, impact you guys, in your opinion?

Mike: I definitely, and maybe this is something to mention just for product managing in general, you need to be curious and you need to be constantly testing. I have hundreds and hundreds of apps on my phone. I’m testing everything. I think you can’t really be good at your job if you’re not playing with everything that’s out there, because things change fast, things evolve fast, and so I think testing of apps is something we do a lot. We look at every app that’s out there that’s remotely doing anything with personalization and emoji and stickers and faces.

We test everything, we play with everything, we collect ideas and thoughts, and just as a reference point to where we’re thinking about going, because certainly we want to try do something that’s innovative and new, but we want to make sure that we’re aware of what’s happening out there, what are the best practices for face detection or for different technologies, how are apps handling these challenges, how are they [inaudible 00:28:52] differently, what do we think is the best approach, so it helps us in that way.

Suzanne: If you had to put a percentage around the amount of time that you’re thinking about researching trends and competition, what would that be?

Mike: It ebbs and flows. We’re in major iteration, right now, of an app and major version increase, so there’s a lot of research involved. Not just by me, but by the art team, by the designers, so it’s a cross-function research effort. If we’re more in maintenance mode, it’s less of that, it may be more specific to a way of doing something that we’re looking at other apps, but at the current moment we’re looking high-level at the landscape and how apps are doing things.

I would always love more time for research because whenever I do research, it always provides dividends on the backend if you provide that effort upfront because you’ll find the products will do things that inspires how you do it that’s better than if you just design with your blinders on without reference to the best practices out there.

Suzanne: Do you have a favorite app right now that’s your go-to, the one you’re allowed to tout outside of JibJab and say “Man, oh man I can’t put this down” [crosstalk 00:30:19]?

Mike: Not related to JibJab? Or just in-

Suzanne: Not related to JibJab. Just when you go out in the world and you have free time, this is the app that you voluntarily tell your friends, family, whoever about because you just think it’s awesome.

Mike: I’m a big news junkie. I follow a lot of news, so I love Feedly for my RSS, Nuzzel is a great one for catching up with news. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Nuzzel.

Suzanne: I’m not. I know of Feedly, tell me about Nuzzel.

Mike: Nuzzel basically looks at your following on Twitter and Facebook and then looks at the news that your graph is sharing, and then rank orders the top news stories that your graph is sharing, and then shows the avatars of your friends that are sharing it. Basically, it just surfaces the best, most interesting news within your social graph. It’s a very high-signal, it’s a great way to keep track of the news with little effort because it automatically gives you the most important things, so I love Nuzzel.

Suzanne: That’s cool! I’m going to check Nuzzel out. What about books? Books or resources, do you have two or three must-reads that you would recommend to anybody whose looking to get into the space or bolster their skills or just things you think “If you haven’t read this, you’re not living”?

Mike: The one I recently like is Hooked, which is a book that’s been pretty popular. I love listening to podcasts, especially about product and tech because I find just a more natural dialogue gets lots of insights and very interesting things to take away from, so Design Details is a great podcast I listen to. It’s centric on design but it feeds over into product quite a bit. That’s really, really good one that I’d recommend, Design Details, podcast-wise.

Suzanne: Great. I’ve just realized you [inaudible 00:32:35] your answer of my inherent bias, because I have not historically been an avid listener of podcasts and being every day gently condoled further even in this exercise we’re doing, but then I think “Book, book, book, article, article, read” and I’ll be the last vestige of people that’s like “I won’t watch my news in a video, I want it in text”.

Mike: I find podcasts because it’s usually more relevant because it just was published and I just love the interview approach where you’re talking to someone, it’s more just like a casual conversation because there’s often just nuggets of insights and things that I just find more approachable and relatable than sitting down with a book, so podcasts is a big thumbs-up for me.

Suzanne: So will you listen to a podcast in the car or on a run or anytime you have a minute? What’s your podcast listening?

Mike: Actually, I got rid of my car 2 years ago. I Uber and Lyft everyday. A side benefit of that is lots more time for listening, so my book reading and podcast listening has gone up quite a bit. I basically have a set handful of podcasts that I must listen, that I listen to while I’m walking or at the gym running or something.

Also, what I found very useful is things that I flag in Feedly go into Pocket and then I have an if this, then that recipe that sends those to Narrow, which is a service that transcribes, text to speech, of those things and then I subscribe to that as a podcast. If I don’t have time, what I’ll often do, my workflow will be I’ll skim headlines on Feedly to batch process, flag the things I want to listen to, those go into Pocket and then sent to another service that I just subscribe to in my podcast client, so while I’m walking I can just be reading the articles I’m interested in reading, not just listening to podcasts. It’s a very useful tool.

Suzanne: You’ve got all the things going on! I like that you have your own individual workflows baked in that using if this, then that, you like that?

Mike: Yeah, I use if this, then that, I use Zapier as well. I think just part of me, just in general, I love designing systems and workflows. I’ve always loved designing admin systems and backend tools. Right now, I’m working on mostly consumer-centric UI, consumer app, but I love getting into the nitty-gritty of systems and workflows and so even with personal life, I try to optimize and build that sort of thing.

Suzanne: Have you been running around the office trying to convince everybody of little automation workflows?

Mike: It’s funny, people joke. I’m always kind of selling someone on an app or selling someone on the thing that they must have, or how their workflow is inefficient and how I could save them one minute. I’m always trying to find that extra percent of optimization.

Suzanne: Awesome. Last question for you. On your personal website, you have a tagline that says “Subtract until it breaks”. What does that mean to you?

Mike: I think a tendency to solve a problem is to always add something, and I think often times by questioning everything, every element on a screen, every element of a product, every feature, and by absolutely only having the core there, you probably solve your problem in a better way than just tacking on something in addition. It’s very hard to do; it’s easier to just slap something on to solve a problem. It’s harder to solve it with less and solve things by pulling away things, and it forces to make those hard decisions about the sort of MVP approach, what are the actual core things we need to include, and only including those. I just like that approach to life, approach to products, that’s why I got rid of my car. Just subtract elements from your life, from your product, from everything so that what’s left is the core.

Suzanne: How many years until you’re just living on a beach somewhere, emancipated entirely from tech, “I found the most highly optimized workflow, it’s getting up and going to the ocean”?

Mike: I don’t know, we’ll see, we’ll see. I think it’s a good way to live. I find it very useful, but…

Suzanne: Cool. Well, listen, thank you so much for your time. It’s really been awesome hearing from you and great answers, great insights, love the office. It’s cool stuff.

Mike: Yeah, for sure. Great.

Suzanne: You’re listening to 100 PM, the official podcast for 100product managers.com. If you haven’t been to our site please check it out we have so many great resources for anybody looking to learn more about product management or starting a technology business, I’m your host Suzanne Abate. Join me here we’ve got a new conversation every Tuesday. We’ll see you next time.